“A penny saved is a penny earned.” – It’s a good personal finance motto to live by, but without a reliable financial management system that transcends traditional managerial accounting methods, how will you be able to track valuable financial data coming in and out of your organization, ensure effective cash management, and keep up with financial operations critical to your company’s success and changing business environments?
This is where the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financial Management system comes in.
Read on to learn more about how JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financial Management can help balance cash flow, provide reliable frameworks to analyze profitability, and integrate financial information throughout your business, as well as where our team of expert JDE Finance consultants can fit in your organization.
Key Products of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financial Management
JDE Financial Management surpasses many traditional accounting methods. Here are a few key products offered in the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financial Management module to help optimize your financial operations and meet the financial consolidation and reporting needs of your organization in an ever-changing business environment:
- Accounts Payable
- Accounts Receivable
- Expense Management
- General Ledger
- Lease Accounting
- Advanced Cost Accounting
- Joint Venture Management
Things to Keep in Mind When Migrating Financial Data to JDE
Now that you have an idea of the basic capabilities of JD Edwards Financials, there are a few things to consider in an acquisition – especially when it comes to migrating the critical financial data of your newly acquired company (NAC) to your JD Edwards system.
Buy-in (and Training) Is Key
You’ll need buy-in from key players in the NAC and the parent company to ensure your financial consolidation goes smoothly. JD Edwards has tools to help out in situations like these, but if users on both sides don’t dedicate time/effort to the process, valuable financial information could be at risk (and your company could lose valuable time and money in the process).
Ensure Your Data Is Mapped Correctly
A key thing to remember when migrating any data from a legacy system to JD Edwards is that all of them are different. And, your biggest concern in this situation is ensuring you’ve mapped your data correctly. JD Edwards has a number of tools and kinds of reports to help you with this, but proper mapping will save you time and headaches and keep your most valuable financial information secure over time.
Next, and just as important, is data validation. Although all data is important, correct financial data is especially important to your business’s continued and healthy operation. This is made more difficult when you realize that data validation isn’t always a one-to-one process when considering the splitting or condensing of accounts.
Luckily, JD Edwards has a feature to help make the process a bit easier: category codes. Most categories have a limit of around three codes, but some (account category codes 21-43) have a limit of 10 each. Use the larger codes for legacy accounts to help clean up navigation. Also, a third account number field is free-form and can be used and reported on for data validation.
Avoid These Common Data Migration Issues
No matter what type of data migration you’re performing, there are some common potholes companies seem to fall into. Luckily for you, we’ve outlined some tips and tricks for avoiding these all-too-frequent problems.
Risk of Data Loss
Any time data is moved from one location to another, there is always a risk of losing some data. Count Reconciliation and Key Financial Column Reconciliation can be used to mitigate this risk.
Count Reconciliation
This type of reconciliation involves comparing the number of records in the legacy and target systems. It’s possible that the data migration process may require the rejection of some records, so these numbers don’t need to match.
Key Financial Column Reconciliation
This type of reconciliation depends on comparing key financial closing information between the legacy and the target system. You can drill down deeper to determine which record(s) are missing if there’s a mismatch.
Data Corruption/Integrity Issues
If the format or data content in the legacy system changes during the migration process, maintaining complete financial integrity can become tricky. Several data validation strategies can solve this issue, including Sample Data Validation, Subsets of Data Validation, and Complete Data Set Validation.
Sample Data Validation
Picking random records or fixed asset reports to validate or profiling samples of records to ensure more data coverage and then comparing those records to the same ones in the new system.
Subsets of Data Validation
Picking larger sets of sample records to validate (the first thousand records, for example) to improve data coverage.
Complete Data Set Validation
The ideal way to validate data is to check all the target records to the legacy records and vice versa. Due to mapping constraints, however, this is pretty much just an ideal.
Semantics Mismatches
Issues can arise if the source data set and the target data set agree on the meaning of a field (Currency, for example) but not the units. While something might be €100 in the source dataset, it would be a mistake to migrate €100 as $100. Another issue might be decimal points. Important information could be lost if the source data set has two places after the decimal point, but the target data set doesn’t.
Interference Risk
Interference risks result from people interacting with the system in a way that unintentionally disrupts the data migration process. For example, if someone is working in a table and they lock it, no one else can interact with the table to perform data validation or count reconciliation.
Tips and Tricks to Survive Month and Year-End Closing
Once a month (or once a year), your Accounting department has to deal with month and year-end closing in JD Edwards. And while you might have an established procedure for how to analyze profitability and perform these financial operations, here are a few tips and tricks that can make both month-end and year-end close easier:
Don’t forget to…
- Use all your accounting periods.
In addition to the 12 monthly accounting periods, JD Edwards gives you an extra 13th and 14th periods. You can use them to separate adjusting entries and audit entries. - Look at your transactions.
Ensure that you’ve processed and cleared all EDI system F47 inbound and outbound transactions. - Check your work orders.
If you have any work orders that can be closed or canceled, month-end/year-end is the perfect time to do so. - Write new tables before clearing old ones.
Ensure you write the interoperability transactions EDI of inventory to an audit table before clearing the interoperability tables. (These are the Z-file tables.) - Check integrity reports.
You’ll want to produce fixed asset reports and validate that all the account balances reflect the general ledger amounts in your reports. - Perform inventory reconciliation.
Companies often perform simple inventory adjustments instead of physical inventory counts, but that can be a big mistake. When it comes to your balance sheet ratios, inventory reconciliation is critical.
Accurately migrating financial data to JD Edwards is a critical financial operations task for any company involved in an acquisition or business change. Obviously, managing and migrating any data is essential, but companies need to have a clear picture of their finances to know what their assets, liabilities, equities, and overall financial conditions are at the end of their financial reporting period.
How Can We Help?
Fortunately, our team of senior-level JD Edwards consultants have the skills and experience to help you – wherever your needs may lie. They can help produce fixed asset reports, maintain purchase requests, maximize the functionality of your traditional managerial accounting methods, build effective cash management strategies, and provide guidance to help your financial management system withstand changing business processes.
We’ve included a sample profile of one of our JD Edwards Financial Management consultants to give you a better idea of what to expect when partnering with us:
Surety Senior JDE Financial Management Consultant
- 25+ years of JD Edwards Financials experience
- Expert with JD Edwards Financial Management (AP, AR, GL, & FA)
- Well-versed with Job Cost, Multi-Currency, and Product Costing modules
- Certified Public Accountant & Certified Management Accountant
- Completed numerous JDE E1 9.2 upgrades/implementations
Contact us today to excel past traditional accounting methods and connect with our team of senior-level JD Edwards financial consultants!
